SOURCE: "Parody Island: Two Novels by Bioy Casares," in Hispanic Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2, Spring, 1983, pp. 43-9.

[In the following essay, Levine asserts that The Invention of Morel and A Plan for Escape comment on the nature of literature by parodying and synthesizing "a whole tradition of utopic works." Levine particularly notes the novellas' ties to H. G. Wells's dystopic work The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896).]

Parody in the new Latin American novel has become a central theme in Hispanic criticism, and one of the first writers to theorize on this subject was Cuban novelist Severo Sarduy. In an essay-parody on Manuel Puig's Boquitas pintadas in which (in the spirit of Don Quijote, Part II) Puig's provincial Argentine women gossip about the sophisticated Parisian transvestites of Sarduy's Cobra, Sarduy defines a concept of parody which goes beyond that of "burlesque imitation" ["Notas a las Notas … A propósito de Manuel Puig," in Revista Iberoamericana, Nos. 76-7 (July-December 1971)]. His point of departure is the cathartic theory of carnivalesque laughter in Mikhail Bakhtin's study Rabelais and His World in which the symbolic spectacle of carnival, a syncretic and universal folkloric tradition, parodies the values and hierarchies of everyday life, in the double sense that carnival both destroys and renews, mocks and pays homage to man's existence. Bakhtin studies the carnivalesque function of literature in Rabelais, but also refers to the Greek satires as well as Don Quijote as models of carnivalesque parody which share in common the same literary mechanisms, i.e. the fusion of genres, the grafting of different types and levels of discourse, and the abolition of narrative autonomy.

Sarduy notes, in the same essay, that Jorge Luis Borges and Bioy Casares, in their Bustos Domecq take-off on the detective genre, Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi (1942), use parody in the carnivalesque sense suggested by Bakhtin: they mock the local color and excessive intricacy of archteypical detective novels, but also glorify and renew the tired genre with their own inventions.

In a discussion on the baroque and neo-baroque [in América Latina en su literatura, 1972], Sarduy goes beyond Bakhtin to point out that parody, in the sense that it is self-conscious revelation of one's sources, is a baroque device that appears in much of contemporary Latin American literature: the baroque text (and he doesn't limit his commentary on the baroque to literature but extends it to the plastic arts, architecture, etc.) is that which allows the reader to discover, to decipher an ever-present sub-text, of which the visible text is always a reflection, a commentary, a re-working or a "memory."

Bioy Casares' two island novels, La invención de Morel (1940) (this novel inspired Robbe-Grillet's script of Alain Resnais' movie Last Year at Marienbad) and Plan de evasión (1945), a more caricaturesque, overtly self-reflexive version of a utopic island adventure, are pioneering works in this rebirth of the baroque in Latin American fiction not only because they reflect each other in this wider sense of parody as commentary on the nature of literature as a process of destruction and re-creation, but also because they synthesize a whole tradition of utopic works beginning, at least, with Plato's Republic and Greek bucolic poetry and culminating perhaps in Victorian science fiction.

It is not new that, in the self-revelatory literature being produced by Borges, Bioy Casares and other twentieth-century American writers, their writing is self-reflexive, since Theocritus' idylls, More's Utopia, and H. G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau were also. (As Borges shows in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (Ficciones, 1941) all writing is inevitably self-reflexive, contained in a reality that differs from, though somehow mirrors, flesh and blood reality. In the filigree of Theocritus' poems, the reader can glimpse epic poetry, mythological legends; in Utopia, Plato's Republic, in Wells' "scientific romance," Jules Verne's Mysterious Island, or Robinson Crusoe, or Gulliver's Travels.) What is new, or neo-baroque, is that contemporary writers not only use models but that they expose them, they write explicitly about this reality of artifice. And Plan de evasión (A Plan for Escape) is certainly an apotheosis of the text as produced by many texts not only because it reflects, in its strategies and allusions, the texts previously mentioned and many others (Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Kafka's Penal Colony, Julien Green's Voyageur Sur la Terre, James' Turn of the Screw, not to mention underlying occidental and oriental myths and legends), but because it exists as a mirror-text of La invención de Morel, a fantastic adventure centered around a love obsession, very much in the spirit of the Surrealist amour fou. Borgesian fantastic fiction, a Frankensteinian fusion of science fiction, detective story and philosophical essay, to which Bioy Casares has added the archetypal love story, is quintessentially carnivalesque in that it cannibalizes all literatures, high and low, Western and Eastern.

I will limit myself here to revealing in some detail what Borges has signalled, in his preface to Morel, as the obvious text which Morel remembers (as well as Plan, I shall add) which is the already-mentioned The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) by H. G. Wells. (To follow all the allusions threading through Morel and Plan is an infinite voyage, [which I have undertaken in part, elsewhere.])

The Island of Doctor Moreau recounts the adventure of Edward Prendick, shipwrecked in the Pacific and picked up by a schooner which happens to be shipping animals to an island (uncharted, of course). On this ship Prendick meets Montgomery, a renegade medical student who, because of some unspecified disgrace (remember this is a Victorian setting), has fled England and is now the assistant of an eccentric scientist, Moreau, who is running a "biological station" of sorts. When they reach Moreau's island, Prendick is left stranded by the unfriendly captain who dislikes Moreau and his strange shipments. The rest of the short book deals with Prendick's gradual discovery of the atrocious nature of Moreau's experiments, the terrifying outcome of these experiments, and Prendick's miraculous salvation from the island. Moreau, as we know, attempts to transform beasts into men and women, by means of surgery that is cruelly performed without anesthesia. Moreau is a kind of Faustian Darwin, and one of the moral (or metaphysical) lessons that Wells' reader is supposed to extract is that man is inevitably and tragically a beast yearning to transcend his mortal prison of flesh and blood (be it through science or religion) but doomed.

Obviously, the parallels between Moreau and Morel go beyond a graphic modification of "au" to "l," even beyond the theme of a scientific invention that is produced on an "unchartered" (i.e. nonexistent except in the text) island in the Pacific. Like Montgomery, the protagonist-narrator of Morel is a renegade from society who is forced, for unspecified reasons (the convenient device of vagueness in "scientific" fantasies, a device already present in More's Utopia), to take refuge on a vaguely-identified Pacific island. Like Prendick, he is isolated because he is stranded on an island which the world either ignores or distrusts. The narrator of Morel also discovers gradually an atrocious "reality" which involves an unheard-of process of transformation: mad scientist-artist Morel kills human beings (who happen to be his friends) and himself in order to transform them into three-dimensional movie images (How prophetic fiction writers can be: the holograph had not yet been invented!). Morel's purpose: to live in eternity with Faustine, the woman he loves but who is indifferent to him. The nameless narrator also falls in love with the distant Faustine and, once he discovers the fantastic machine, decides to sacrifice life and transform himself into an eternal image as well. Morel, a novel overtly about the romantic sacrifice of life for love, and art, through the metaphor of fantastic transfigurations, is also a metamorphosis of Moreau, a novel about metamorphoses. The scientific content in both is really a "pre-text."

At this superficial level of plot it is not difficult to recognize Plan as a further stage in this series of changes. While mad Dr. Castel's name (a salute to Kafka's Castle perhaps) does not echo Moreau's as Morel's does, Castel's experiment is, in many ways, more reminiscent of Moreau's. Like the latter's, Castel's involves surgery: Castel, the governor of a penal colony on an apocryphal Devil's Island, is performing a kind of post-symbolist synesthetic surgery on the prisoners, changing their powers of perception so that when they look upon their cell walls they will perceive a paradise island. Nevers, the innocent bystander, (forced by his family because of some unspecified disgrace, (again!) to accept a military assignment on Devil's Island) is yet another avatar of the unwilling outsider who gradually discovers (and becomes involved) in the "awful truth" of a science fiction experiment. When Nevers first encounters Castel he sees him surrounded by a flock of animals and finds out later that Castel did his first operations on animals. At this point, Bioy Casares does more than allude to Moreau; he openly exhibits his "source"; that is, the narrator, Nevers' Uncle Antoine, basing his story on Nevers' letters, writes: "Tal vez Castel fuese una especie de doctor Moreau. Le costaba creer, sin embargo, que la realidad se pareciera a una novela fantástica." No apparent ambiguity here: the Moreau alluded to in Morel is spelled out clearly in the more parodic text Plan.

However, just as the above quotation is ironic—it is a novel, Plan, and not "reality" which resembles a "fantastic novel" (Moreau)—so are the references to Moreau in Morel and Plan tricks that the writer is playing on the reader. The mention of Doctor Moreau in Plan suggests one plot to the reader when the "plot" is actually another (just as, indeed, Bioy Casares' novels are not transparent transmitters of messages but metaphoric elaborations on the solitary, self-reflexive nature of perception and of writing). Morel and Plan continue to tease the reader even after the "truth" is discovered because we never really know if it is true (too many unreliable narrators as intermediaries); indeed, particularly in the case of Plan, an open-ended labyrinth, the final fate of the protagonist is never known.

Specific signs of parody of Wells' text abound in Plan. When Nevers finally meets Castel's mysterious assistant and "collaborator," a young man named De Brinon (actual name of a French Nazi collaborator), a kind of comic synthesis of Montgomery and M'ling, Nevers describes De Brinon's voice as follows:

Dice Nevers que tuvo la impresión de que la distancia que lo separaba de De Brinon había desaparecido y que la voz—atrozmente—sonaba a su lado. Dice que llama voz al sonido que oyó porque, aparentemente, De Brinon es un hombre; pero que oyó el berrido de una oveja. Añade que parecía una voz de ventrílocuo imitando a una oveja y que De Brinon casi no abría la boca al hablar. (Plan)

Again, in ths slapstick version of terror, the echo of Dr. Moreau rings clear: the fact that De Brinon sounds like an animal though he is a man, suggests Dr. Moreau's conversion of beasts into men whose original nature is not eradicated but is insidiously visible, between the lines, so to speak. But at the same time the echo turns out to be a false clue not only because of the discovery of the "true" nature of Castel's experiments, but because of Bioy's ironic, comic way of revealing Nevers' "impression" which contrasts with Wells' authentically suspenseful narration of Prendick's impression when he first sees M'ling aboard the schooner: "I … had a disconnected impression of a dark face with extraordinary eyes close to mine, but that I thought was a nightmare, until I met it again." And when he meets it again: "In some indefinable way the black face thus flashed upon me shocked me profoundly. It was a singularly deformed one. The facial part projected, forming something dimly suggestive of a muzzle" (Moreau). Wells' tone is one of insidious horror, and what is suggested here—M'ling's beastly nature—is later confirmed.

On the other hand, Nevers' nightmarish encounter with De Brinon is described with comical, ambiguous distance, especially Nevers' first view of De Brinon which immediately precedes the unexpected bellow:

Allí estaba De Brinon. Nevers no tuvo un momento de duda. Era la primera vez que veía a ese joven atlético, de cara despierta y franca, de mirada inteligente, que se reclinaba, abstraído, sobre un enfermo. Ese joven tenía que ser De Brinon. (Plan)

After this comforting view of De Brinon as an intelligent-looking youth, comes the shocking contrast of the demented voice, comic not only because of the abrupt juxtaposition but because of Nevers' incoherent description of a sheep's voice as a bellow (instead of baaing).

Whereas in Wells there is a rational sequence of events leading from first suspicions to final discoveries, in Bioy Casares, the logic is that of the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass, or of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, i.e. dream logic. Unlike M'ling, whose beastliness becomes gradually apparent, the handsome De Brinon is abruptly reduced to a strange animalistic, disembodied voice: the extraordinary suddenly invades everyday reality. But while this extraordinary factor could appear to be explained by Moreau, i.e. the text between the lines, it isn't: Nevers thinks there is something beastly about De Brinon but also remarks that he could be "mentally retarded" (Plan). The absolute truth about De Brinon as about everything else can never be ascertained. Infinite uncertainty is what the reader of contemporary fantastic fiction is left with.

The shipwreck incident is a cliché of the island adventure without which the three plots would be incomplete but again, though the adventure of the Morel protagonist is closer to Prendick's in that both are stranded on an island while Nevers is officially dispatched to one, there are greater anecdotal similarities between Moreau and Plan. The shipwreck tale of one of the prisoners on Devil's Island, called the Priest, is, in many of its details, a reduction, a condensed version and thus a parodic commentary of Edward Prendick's adventure. Like Prendick, the Priest, when his "ship wrecked", was in the only boat that was not picked up until many days later, after many privations; just as Prendick's dinghy loses sight of the others, so does the Priest's. In Prendick's case, the water soon runs out and the men start going mad: indeed, madness drives two of them to kill each other, as madness probably drives the Priest to kill off his companions. Prendick himself feels threatened by madness and laughs insanely when his companions fall into the water, a laugh, he says, that "caught me like a thing from without" (Moreau). The Priest (an ironic name, of course) remains crazed after his ordeal, and sees only hallucinations and monsters, all of which leads to disastrous consequences when he is operated on by Dr. Castel.

The slight suggestion in Moreau that Prendick's story may not be credible because the whole thing may have been a hallucination (he mentions seeing M'ling's face as if in a nightmare) becomes a labyrinth of doubts in Morel and Plan, where not only minor characters like the Priest are crazy but where there are many doubts as to the sanity or credibility of the protagonists, all unreliable narrators. Here again, if one explanation of Prendick's experience on the island is that it was all a hallucination, then the Priest's island drama, a parody of Prendick's, is infinitely more "unreal".

The echoes of Moreau in Morel, and even more pronounced in Morel's mirror-text, Plan, are false leads which are true leads. While Morel and Plan deal with different "experiments" (having more to do with art than with science), the fact that both of Bioy Casares' novels suggest that their "source" could be another book rather than an empirical reality, points to an ultimate "truth," to a textual reality. And Morel and Plan are parodies not so much in the sense that they are renewing the science fiction genre, as perhaps Bustos Domecq has done for the detective genre, but in the sense that they are commenting on the "nature" of all literature: Texts represent not a presence but an absence; the referent is always, already out of reach.

Elsewhere I have examined a useful strategy in utopic island adventures, the already-mentioned first-person narrative, and how what in Robinson Crusoe guaranteed an illusion of authenticity in the early eighteenth century, in Morel and Plan emphasizes the very literariness, the very artificiality of the account of an extraordinary adventure.

But here it will have to suffice to say that the concept of parody, in the wider sense of commentary, of creation as re-creation, not only illuminates the mode of Bioy Casares' two novels but of many of the more original works of Latin American literature today.